A man wanders into a small coastal town. Young and disarming, he makes friends easily. No one would suspect he's a serial killer.

That scenario, introduced in Lew McCreary's 1990 novel "The Minus Man," was enough to induce screenwriter Hampton Fancher ("Blade Runner") to direct his first film at 60. The result, also called "The Minus Man," is a half-baked disappointment that opens today.

A lot of talent went into "The Minus Man," beginning with Owen Wilson, the young actor who appeared in "The Haunting" and co- wrote "Rushmore." Wilson plays Vann Siegert, a soft-spoken drifter who arrives in a sleepy little town and charms everyone while simultaneously dispatching a series of victims.

"You don't always choose what you do," Vann says in the voice-over monologue that runs through the film. "Sometimes what you do chooses you."

Vann selects his prey at random -- not because they cross him or remind him of the past, but because they were there when the impulse struck. Fancher's point is the ordinariness of evil, the notion that good and bad, morality and pathology, are precariously balanced in all of us.

It's not a bad theme, but his script, which takes us inside Vann's head and reveals his thoughts as he rationalizes another murder, leaves too many points unanswered. We learn nothing of Vann's background, his family or the roots of his madness.

"I never make a plan," his inner voice says. "Like a comet shooting across the sky, it just happens."

The only window into Vann's craziness is a series of fantasy sequences, apparently dreamt by Vann, that introduce two detectives played by Dwight Yoakam and Dennis Haysbert. They're the superego of Vann -- the tiny part of him that feels guilt and remorse, that fears being caught and acknowledges a moral code.

Fancher undercuts the brutal nature of this material by giving fast, painless deaths to Vann's victims and overlaying his film with Marco Beltrami's delicate music and Bobby Bukowski's gorgeous cinematography. There's nothing overtly harsh or nightmarish in "The Minus Man" -- despite our knowledge that Vann will strike again.

As a director, Fancher is generous with actors but has no sense of rhythm. His editor, Todd Ramsay, might have brightened the pace and removed the slackness, but he didn't, and "The Minus Man" gets awfully sluggish as it dribbles toward its finish.

The actors are all fine: Brian Cox and Mercedes Ruehl as a couple who rent a room to Vann; Janeane Garofalo, cast against type as a naive postal worker; Eric Mabius (who also appears in "Splendor," opening today) as a high-school football star and singer Sheryl Crow, in her film debut, as a barfly who talks up the wrong guy.

Despite their work, "The Minus Man" never flies, never comes close to meeting its own expectations.